On the road at last

Finally, after many many delays I am on the road. It feels wonderful. Really really wonderful. Which means there should now be lots of updates to the blog because lots of exciting stuff will be happening.

For those reading this that don’t know why I am months behind schedule there are two major reasons. First, my house hasn’t sold yet… I’m still trying, but I’ve decided I just need to go regardless and deal with it from the road. If it doesn’t sell very soon I’ll again consider leasing it. However, the delays have backed me somewhat into a corner. Paying a mortgage for much longer than planned has eaten into my travel funds, leaving me the choice of using a small portion of the proceeds from the sale to fund my travel or if I lease it to take some equity out of the house and use that. Either way I think I’ll be running short on funds in about 3-4 months if I don’t figure something out. Second, is that two months ago I made the decision to “just go” and worry about the house from the road, but it seemed prudent before heading across the country in the middle of a heat wave to get the air conditioning fixed on my Volga. Mind you this wasn’t a simple proposition since the air conditioning hasn’t been hooked up since I put a new motor in the car five years ago. Mind you the motor I put in wasn’t the stock vanagon motor, so none of the existing hoses, wiring, etc… plugs directly into the air conditioning compressor mounted on the new motor. Needless to say it wasn’t a small job and a really only trusted on air conditioning mechanic I’ve know for a long time that does a great deal of custom work to do the job. Well what was supposed to me one weeks work turned into eight. I expected it to really take two weeks, but two weeks in my otherwise excellent mechanic clipped the door of his garage backing my vanagon into his shop. He did the right thing. He called me immediately to look at the damage and immediate said “you don’t need to worry about anything, we’ll take care of everything, but I wanted you to see it first”. He also relayed the the body shop had already looked at it and thought it’s take three days. However, he still had a weeks worth of work before it could go to the body shop, and then he’d have a few days after it came back to charge the system and make sure everything was working right. I didn’t believe the three day figure from the body shop and and figured it’s probably be a week at the body shop. Well, it was closer to two weeks at the body shop, but it came out good and I’m happy with the repair, and then it was over a week after it got back from the body shop. So, two month later I have my van back, the body work looks good, in fact my previously dented up bumper has been replaced and looks better than ever; and, my air conditioning works fabulously.

The lack of updates isn’t to say that nothing has happened worth note in the last couple weeks. Most significantly Seema and Tim got married in a beautiful ceremony. Seema and Tim are both friends who used to work for RBF before Seem a went back to school for her masters at Colorado State Univ (where I went for 2.5 years) and Tim later followed her to Colorado as well. They are really great people and clearly both come from great families too. The ceremony was a fusion of Indian (mostly) and Christian (a little) traditions. I’ve been to a lot of weddings. It comes from the philosophy that you always go to weddings and even more so funerals, more on this some other time, but I also feel honored to have been invited to and been in as many weddings as I have. Regardless one thing is clear to me. The average American doesn’t party… There are no absolutes, but really the amount of celebrating going on at the Indian, Jewish, Chinese and other ethnically flavored weddings just shames the white Christian/Catholic weddings I’ve been to. White Christian weddings seem to be a ceremony followed by a pleasant dinner and a little dancing. Ethnic weddings are grand celebrations where everyone dances with wild abandon from grandmothers down to little kids. Where families celebrate the coming together that is occurring